In an attempt to recognize biodiversity as a problem, Japan and other Asian-Pacific countries adopted the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity. But first things first—achieve human well-being in harmony with nature.

In Nagoya, Japan, in 2010, the international community made a commitment to future generations by adopting the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020 and 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets.

In doing this, governments recognized that biodiversity is not just a problem to be solved, but rather the source of solutions to 21st century challenges such as climate change, food and water security, health, disaster risk reduction, and poverty alleviation. In taking this action, countries affirmatively recognised that biodiversity is essential for sustainable development and the foundation for human well-being.

We now know that real change does not come from ‘silver bullet’ solutions, but from those strategies that simultaneously address the multiple underlying causes of biodiversity loss.

The Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 and its Aichi Biodiversity Targets are a framework for the world to achieve the vision of human beings living in harmony with nature. If achieved, by the middle of the 21st century, we will enjoy economic and social well-being while conserving and sustainably using the biodiversity that sustains our healthy planet and delivers the benefits essential to us all.

This is within our reach. And if we succeed, we will ensure that by the end of this decade, the ecosystems of the world are resilient and continue to provide for our well-being and contribute to eradication of the poverty that holds back human aspirations. The Aichi Biodiversity Targets are about taking action now for the benefit of our collective future.

We are now approaching the mid-way mark of the United Nations Decade on Biodiversity. Governments of the world will meet in Pyeongchang, Republic of Korea in early October at the 12th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP-12) where they will launch and review the Global Biodiversity Outlook 4 (GBO4), the latest global assessment of the state of biodiversity. As they review GBO4, they will see how we are all doing in achieving this vision.

The good news is that countries and civil society are making progress, and concrete commitments to implement the Aichi Biodiversity Targets are being taken. Our current efforts are taking us in the right direction.

However, achieving many targets will require substantial additional efforts.

Additional pressures are being placed on the life-support systems of our planet by a greater population, by climate change, land degradation, over exploitation of species and spread of alien invasive species as a consequence of economic decisions that neglect to fully take into account the value of environmental assets and of biodiversity. Extra efforts will be needed to overcome these human-made challenges.

What kind of actions need to be taken? We now know that real change does not come from ‘silver bullet’ solutions, but from those strategies that simultaneously address the multiple underlying causes of biodiversity loss – subsidies that lead to overexploitation, habitat loss, climate change, inefficiencies in agriculture among others – while addressing the direct pressures on our natural systems.

There is an increasing need to develop strategic and sustained actions to address both the underlying and immediate causes of biodiversity loss in a coordinated way. There is a need to mainstream biodiversity into policies and actions well beyond the sectors that focus on conservation.

At the Pyeongchang meeting governments will need to make additional commitments to ensure that their actions are effective and achieve the desired results. They will need to agree to mobilise sufficient financial and human resources in support of such actions – increasing significantly current efforts.

The actions that are needed to overcome the loss of biodiversity and the ongoing erosion of our natural life support systems are varied: integrating the values of biodiversity into national accounts and policy, changes in economic incentives, enforcing rules and regulations, the full and active participation of indigenous and local communities and stakeholders and engagement by the business sector. Partnerships at all levels will need to be agreed and vigorously pursued.

At COP-12, events such as a Business Forum and a Summit of Cities and Subnational Governments, and meetings of Biodiversity Champions, will help to build the networks and partnerships needed to realise this.

These actions for long-term work take time to lead to measureable outcomes. Direct action is needed now to conserve the most threatened species and ecosystems. So, we will need to continue our work in establishing protected areas and expanding networks for terrestrial and marine areas. We will need to work with partners to save the most endangered species. We will need an urgent push for the protection of coral reefs.

Our immediate and our long-term efforts can and must be strengthened by understanding the critical links between biodiversity and sustainable development. Measures required to achieve the Aichi Biodiversity Targets will also support the post-2015 development agenda, and the proposed Sustainable Development Goals currently under discussion at the United Nations General Assembly.

In this way achieving the Targets will assist in achieving the goals of greater food security, healthier populations and improved access to clean water and sustainable energy for all. Implementing the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020 means already implementing our strategy for sustainable development.

The theme of the High Level Segment of the Pyeongchang meeting reflects this. For two days in October, over 100 ministers and high level representatives will discuss “Biodiversity for sustainable development.”

In choosing this theme, the government of Korea has made it clear we must continue our efforts to not only achieve the mission of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity, but the social, economic and environmental goals of sustainable development, and to achieve human well-being in harmony with nature.

Let’s start with Jeff Mitchell’s car. From the outside, it looks like a regular, if slightly dinged-up, white Prius. But inside it’s so messy that it’s hard for me to describe it without sounding like I’m exaggerating.

When I say the back seat is packed solidly with papers, I mean that literally: It’s as if Mitchell had pulled up alongside a set of filing cabinets and transferred everything that could fit into the back, carefully filling the leg space until it was high enough to be incorporated into the stack on the seats. The papers are wedged solidly together, three-quarters of the way up to the headrests.

There’s some PVC pipe back there too, some metal tools, a power cord, and some luggage. But that’s just what I could see on the surface. On the front dash there’s another layer of files, and a layer of dirt. And again, when I say dirt, I’m not overstating it. It’s not just a patina of dust; there are big clots of mud clinging to the face of the radio.

“What can I say?” Mitchell said when I asked about the state of his vehicle. “I’m embarrassed. People say I could just scatter seeds in here and they’d grow.”

I was never able to get a straight answer out of Mitchell as to why his car was so squalid, but it’s easy enough to guess. He has spent years driving up and down California’s long Central Valley, from one field to another, asking farmers to sign up to try new conservation techniques. He estimates that the car has driven 600,000 miles, though he can’t say for sure: The odometer stopped at 299,999. The car really does have to function as a high-speed file cabinet, as well as a mobile tool shed and soil-sample transporter.

“So, is this basically your life?” I asked, after about an hour driving down highway 99. I was expecting a good-natured gripe about him becoming permanently welded to the driver’s seat. But instead he said:

“You know, I’ve been truly fortunate. I’ve been doing this long enough that wherever I go I’ll look out and see a field and think, ‘That’s where we did that one trial, how’s that coming along?’ And there have been some big changes. It’s gratifying. There’s a soil scientist at Berkeley, Garrison Sposito, who says it may be just once or twice in a century that agriculture has an opportunity to re-create itself in a revolutionary way. Now, it may sound way over the top, but I think that’s what’s happening with conservation agriculture. It’s energizing for me to wake up to that every day.”

His official title is Associate Extension Vegetable Crops Specialist, but since the early 1990s Mitchell has really been a Johnny Appleseed for conservation, leading an ever-growing band of farmers toward sustainability. The idea driving Mitchell’s work is to develop farm systems that are closer to proven natural systems. That main idea breaks down into four tenets: Don’t disturb the soil; maximize the diversity of plants, insects, fungi, and microbiota; keep living roots in the soil; and keep the ground covered with plant residues. Since 1999, a team working with Mitchell has been demonstrating that it’s possible to do all that profitably.

After another hour on the road we reached the University of California West Side Extension and Research Center. Behind a handful of one-story buildings lay a collection of plots that workers have farmed continuously with conservation techniques. Mitchell took me to a field where they had been experimenting with a tomato-and-cotton rotation since 1999: “These beds have not moved, they have not been worked, in 15 years.” This 15-year study suggests that there are real, sustained benefits to the methods that the UC researchers have pioneered.

Mitchell waded into the shoulder-high cover crops of one bed. There’s a bed nearby of cleanly plowed soil. The contrast couldn’t be more different. Mitchell knelt in the cover crop, pushing aside the plants. The earth was covered in a layer of duff (dead leaves and twigs). It looked a lot like — well, like any bit of ground that humans haven’t recently scraped.

These kind of innovations might seem obvious, but the journey to no-till cotton has been exasperatingly hard. Cotton requires coddling: It has a large seed, but it’s not a vigorous seedling, so often a farmer will knock off a layer of dry soil, drop the seeds onto moist earth, then cover it up. All this requires tilling the field. So Mitchell’s team decided to fine tune a planter to bury the seeds at just the right depth: Too close to the surface and they’d dry out, too deep and they’d never make it up. But when they ran the planter over the field it bounced over dry tomato stalks and dropped seeds higgledy-piggledy.

That first year the crop came up patchy. So they started trying residue managers, to push debris out of the way of each seed line, then brush it back into place. Mitchell went to Georgia to see what they were using there. They tried different timing and amounts of irrigation. If they tried to plant while the field was too wet the tractor would turn everything into a muddy mess. If they waited until it dried, the seed wouldn’t get enough moisture. If they irrigated after planting, the soil might form a hard crust that the seed couldn’t penetrate. They made pass after pass, making minute adjustments to the equipment until tempers frayed.

“I’m not an argumentative guy, but some of the things have been so trying,” Mitchell remembered. At the end of one of those days, one of Mitchell’s collaborators threw up his hands and said, “This will never work!” But then, in 2004, after years of disappointments, they finally hit on just the right combination of techniques — specific levels of irrigation, fine-tuned equipment, special disk and finger attachments for the planter — and got a beautiful cotton crop.

When all the pieces came together, the cotton began producing reliably. And Mitchell also noticed an added benefit: As the years passed, the soil improved, and all this got easier. Instead of the farm equipment needing to break up clots of compacted soil, the researchers found they were planting into soft, fine-grained earth, continuously tilled by worms and roots and microorganisms.

Mitchell’s work looks like a clear winner on paper: The yields are now the same as in the plowed beds, and the no-till beds take less work, sequester more carbon, suck up less water, and require less tractor fuel. And yet few farmers have taken up these methods.

“When I had the results showing that you can save 16 percent of irrigation water with residues and no till, I thought it would really change things in the Valley,” Mitchell mused. “But it hasn’t seemed to be that relevant.”

There are farmers successfully using these methods, but the percentage is still very low. And Mitchell can understand why people are skeptical. The cost savings — for fuel and labor (water prices are too variable to estimate) — are just $70 an acre, which isn’t terribly significant for a cotton farmer. And, as Mitchell knows, there are lots of things that can go wrong when a farmer starts trying new things.

That reluctance to change doesn’t slow Mitchell down for long. He knows that surmounting the technological challenges is less than half the battle. The bulk of the work is in teaching people how to do the same thing, and — even more importantly — convincing them that it’s worth their time.

And so he gets in the dirty Prius again, year in and year out, adding mile after uncounted mile, and carrying his Johnny Appleseed act across California.

As few as one diet soda daily may increase the risk for leukemia in men and women, and for multiple myeloma and non-Hodgkin lymphoma in men, according to new results from the longest-ever running study on aspartame as a carcinogen in humans. Importantly, this is the most comprehensive, long-term study ever completed on this topic, so it holds more weight than other past studies which appeared to show no risk. And disturbingly, it may also open the door for further similar findings on other cancers infuture studies.

For this study, researchers prospectively analyzed data from the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study for a 22-year period. A total of 77,218 women and 47,810 men were included in the analysis, for a total of 2,278,396 person-years of data. Apart from sheer size, what makes this study superior to other past studies is the thoroughness with which aspartame intake was assessed.

Every two years, participants were given a detailed dietary questionnaire, and their diets were reassessed every four years. Previous studies which found no link to cancer only ever assessed participants’ aspartame intake at one point in time, which could be a major weakness affecting their accuracy.

These results were based on multi-variable relative risk models, all in comparison to participants who drank no diet soda. It is unknown why only men drinking higher amounts of diet soda showed increased risk for multiple myeloma and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Note that diet soda is the largest dietary source of aspartame (by far) in the U.S. Every year, Americans consume about 5,250 tons of aspartame in total, of which about 86 percent (4,500 tons) is found in diet sodas.

This new study shows the importance of the quality of research. Most of the past studies showing no link between aspartame and cancer have been criticized for being too short in duration and too inaccurate in assessing long-term aspartame intake.

This new study solves both of those issues. The fact that it also shows a positive link to cancer should come as no surprise, because a previous best-in-class research study done on animals (900 rats over their entire natural lifetimes) showed strikingly similar results back in 2006: aspartame significantly increased the risk for lymphomas and leukemia in both males and females.

More worrying is the follow on mega-study, which started aspartame exposure of the rats at the fetal stage. Increased lymphoma and leukemia risks were confirmed, and this time the female rats also showed significantly increased breast (mammary) cancer rates. This raises a critical question: will future, high-quality studies uncover links to the other cancers in which aspartame has been implicated (brain, breast, prostate, etc.)?

There is now more reason than ever to completely avoid aspartame in our daily diet. For those who are tempted to go back to sugary sodas as a “healthy” alternative, this study had a surprise finding: men consuming one or more sugar-sweetened sodas daily saw a 66 percent increase in non-Hodgkin lymphoma (even worse than for diet soda).

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphNEW YORK – In the shadow of the euro crisis and America’s fiscal cliff, it is easy to ignore the global economy’s long-term problems. But, while we focus on immediate concerns, they continue to fester, and we overlook them at our peril.

Illustration by Paul Lachine

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe most serious is global warming. While the global economy’s weak performance has led to a corresponding slowdown in the increase in carbon emissions, it amounts to only a short respite. And we are far behind the curve: Because we have been so slow to respond to climate change, achieving the targeted limit of a two-degree (centigrade) rise in global temperature, will require sharp reductions in emissions in the future.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphSome suggest that, given the economic slowdown, we should put global warming on the backburner. On the contrary, retrofitting the global economy for climate change would help to restore aggregate demand and growth.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphAt the same time, the pace of technological progress and globalization necessitates rapid structural changes in both developed and developing countries alike. Such changes can be traumatic, and markets often do not handle them well.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphJust as the Great Depression arose in part from the difficulties in moving from a rural, agrarian economy to an urban, manufacturing one, so today’s problems arise partly from the need to move from manufacturing to services. New firms must be created, and modern financial markets are better at speculation and exploitation than they are at providing funds for new enterprises, especially small and medium-size companies.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphMoreover, making the transition requires investments in human capital that individuals often cannot afford. Among the services that people want are health and education, two sectors in which government naturally plays an important role (owing to inherent market imperfections in these sectors and concerns about equity).

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphBefore the 2008 crisis, there was much talk of global imbalances, and the need for the trade-surplus countries, like Germany and China, to increase their consumption. That issue has not gone away; indeed, Germany’s failure to address its chronic external surplus is part and parcel of the euro crisis. China’s surplus, as a percentage of GDP, has fallen, but the long-term implications have yet to play out.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphAmerica’s overall trade deficit will not disappear without an increase in domestic savings and a more fundamental change in global monetary arrangements. The former would exacerbate the country’s slowdown, and neither change is in the cards. As China increases its consumption, it will not necessarily buy more goods from the United States. In fact, it is more likely to increase consumption of non-traded goods – like health care and education – resulting in profound disturbances to the global supply chain, especially in countries that had been supplying the inputs to China’s manufacturing exporters.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphFinally, there is a worldwide crisis in inequality. The problem is not only that the top income groups are getting a larger share of the economic pie, but also that those in the middle are not sharing in economic growth, while in many countries poverty is increasing. In the US, equality of opportunity has been exposed as a myth.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphWhile the Great Recession has exacerbated these trends, they were apparent long before its onset. Indeed, I (and others) have argued that growing inequality is one of the reasons for the economic slowdown, and is partly a consequence of the global economy’s deep, ongoing structural changes.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphAn economic and political system that does not deliver for most citizens is one that is not sustainable in the long run. Eventually, faith in democracy and the market economy will erode, and the legitimacy of existing institutions and arrangements will be called into question.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe good news is that the gap between the emerging and advanced countries has narrowed greatly in the last three decades. Nonetheless, hundreds of millions of people remain in poverty, and there has been only a little progress in reducing the gap between the least developed countries and the rest.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe market will not, on its own, solve any of these problems. Global warming is a quintessential “public goods” problem. To make the structural transitions that the world needs, we need governments to take a more active role – at a time when demands for cutbacks are increasing in Europe and the US.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphAs we struggle with today’s crises, we should be asking whether we are responding in ways that exacerbate our long-term problems. The path marked out by the deficit hawks and austerity advocates both weakens the economy today and undermines future prospects. The irony is that, with insufficient aggregate demand the major source of global weakness today, there is an alternative: invest in our future, in ways that help us to address simultaneously the problems of global warming, global inequality and poverty, and the necessity of structural change.

We need to understand that nature is not the enemy; it should be protected and harmed only as a means to survive.

The United States comes from a long tradition of cultural values that are based on the idea of separation from nature. Nature is evil, something to overcome, to be controlled. So we have separated ourselves from it. Our history of conquering nature brought us to a point now, in America, where we mercilessly and without forethought, engage in willful mass murder of domesticated animals within our borders of control; not for the survival of our people, but for the sustainment of economic powers.

What about cage-free chickens? What about Kobe beef? And other animal products labeled similarly? Lies. They are are simply lies built up through marketing rhetoric to trick the American people into thinking they are purchasing a more humane product. Cage-free chicken means that the giant death house where the chickens are kept in the dark from birth to death, wing to wing, on top of each other, are exposed to sunlight once a day, by opening the barn doors. Kobe beef? Don’t those cows get massages and beer? Well, there is no such thing as Kobe beef in America. Kobe beef comes from a very specific stock of cows in Japan. Everything marked in America as Kobe beef is simply a marketing ploy. Tricks like these and countless others attempt to pacify us in light of the atrocities committed by America every second of every day.

To the Plains Indians, buffalo were the givers of life, food, clothing, shelter, and spiritual understanding. The animal was their brother and a necessary kill so that many could live. The fallen animal was worshipped; every part used. Americans shot them from the comfort and safety of trains. We let their carcasses spoil and rot in the sun. We continue this tradition today, but we have perfected the process. We create factories, where living creatures are measured by the dollar, bred, tortured, murdered, and done in a way so we don’t have to see the carnage beside the railroad tracks any more. But they are still there.

Animals have always played an integral part of Western culture. The Ancient Greeks performed ritualistic animal sacrifice in order to appease the gods. But the Greeks still understood the cruelty of killing any living creature, and only performed these gruesome acts so that their people might prosper and survive. Indeed, the common Greek only ever ate meat during such rituals, and excluded the flesh of living creatures from their daily diet. This connection and compassion with these animals is personified in the Greek’s comedy of innocence, in which several cows are made to walk in circles around a shrine of food, and the first to reach for the food, and stretch out his neck, was ‘consenting’ to his sacrifice. The sacrifice represented their human blood, the animal is again related, a brother. Now cows represent little more than McDonald’s, steak, and cruel American tradition.

Why are we like this? Unfortunately, man (as in males), throughout the centuries, have found ways of subjugating that which threatens them. The same thing happen to women, who were worshipped as the embodiment of the universe when we were agriculturists, until the hunter-gathering cultures that focused on the kill, the strong bodied, and the aggressive. Their religions revolved around the god, not the goddess. These are the same men who wrote the bible, a text that does more to demonize nature than any other text in our history. The bible has man betrayed by the serpent. We are removed from nature, kicked out of Eden; we live in exile of nature. Nature, like the serpent, like the woman, is dangerous, and must be controlled.

What do we do? The first thing we need to do is realize that ‘mom and pop’ farms no longer exist. We need to understand that nature is not the enemy; it should be protected and harmed only as a means to survive. In order for the American people to change, which should be any compassionate soul’s wish, we need to educate our people of the horrors allowed to prosper in our land. We need to actively and immediately protest the killing of cows, chicken, fish, whales, and countless others. These murders are not so we may survive, but so that cruel institutions can turn a buck. We can’t let the ever changing climate of politics and society to get to animal rights when they can. We need to make animal rights matter now.

ABOUT CALEB JACOBO

Caleb Jacobo is an independent writer living in Southern California. He runs the New American Scholar Project, an orginization focused on making great works of literature accessible for everyone. You can find out more about Caleb at his blog at calebjacobo.com. You can find out more about the New American Scholar Project here thenasproject.org.

When even drunks can operate a manual corkscrew what’s the point of making an electric one?

At long last, our dream has come true, freeing us from the drudgery that has oppressed so many people over the past 500 years or so — namely, having to use our hands to open a bottle of wine.

Yes, the electric corkscrew is here, and just in the nick of time for that fabulous New Year’s Eve party you’re throwing.

Not just one high-tech cork-puller is offered, but an entire bazaar of wine-opening gizmos is available from such enterprising purveyors of completely unnecessary convenience as Epicureanist, Metrokane, Oster, Ozeri, Waring, and Wine Enthusiast. New York Times writer William Grimes describes the devices as “sublime pointlessness.”

He has a point there, since popping a cork isn’t one of life’s great burdens. Especially whenbeaucoup super-cheap, super-simple extractors have long existed. These manual tools are not merely low-tech, they’re no-tech. Even drunk people can use them.

But where’s the pizzazz in those? As Grimes describes the zippy, battery-powered cork gadgets, one places the cylindrical device atop a wine bottle’s cork, presses a button and, “with a hum or a whir, the corkscrew spiral, known as a worm, insinuates itself into the cork, easing it upward and out of the bottle.”

This is showbiz, baby — and one-upsmanship, too, since you’re quietly saying to bedazzled guests: “Hey, I’ve got one of these and you don’t!”

However, if you want to counter such smugness, here’s a free tip: Many good wines now come with twist-off screw caps, so bring one of those, and you’ll be sipping your fruit-of-the-vine while electronic-man is still trying to position his worm.

Does anyone really need this stuff? Of course not — zillions of them will end up in landfills in a year’s time. To wean yourself and others from such excess, check out Annie Leonard’s website: www.StoryOfStuff.org.

ABOUT JIM HIGHTOWER

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be – consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.

If you have a problem reading this email, please click here to see the web page version
You received this email because you signed up for it at OpEdNews. Unsubscribe instructions are at the bottom of this email.

First, Opednews is allying with NetAction for this newsletter. The topic is one close to my heart, and one I started writing on about 18 months ago– Debillionairizing America. Please check it out and support Roots Action– a great group run by good friends of Opednews.com.

It’s time we outlaw billionaires by placing a 100% tax on wealth over

Since 1980, the top 1% has sucked up 80% of all new wealth created. In 2010, the wealthiest 1% grabbed 93% of all new income.

The richest 400 Americans — all of whom are billionaires — own more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans combined. The richest six heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune own more wealth than the bottom 30% of Americans combined. Billionaires have sucked so much wealth out of our economy that the rest of us are drowning.

We work harder. Productivity is up. But the profits are taken by the billionaires, who buy politicians and legislate rules to the ever greater advantage of billionaires — and to the disadvantage of clean air, food, water, security, healthcare, education, retirement, and energy.

No matter the outcome of the 2012 presidential election, we must eventually face the fact that our political system is broken. As such, our future struggle will be about whether we are able to fix it our not. And we must realize that the “it” we need to fix inheres not in our laws, our constitution or even some other arcane program. The “it” we need to fix is ourselves.

::::::::

No matter the outcome of the 2012 presidential election, we must eventually face the fact that our political system is broken. As such, our future struggle will be about whether we are able to fix it our not. And we must realize that the “it” we need to fix inheres not in our laws, our constitution or even some other arcane program. The “it” we need to fix is ourselves.

The Pundits

On the 11/4/12 edition of ABC’s “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos asked the roundtable:

“What does it mean for whoever wins”.[the presidential election][when they are] almost certain to face”a very similar lineup in Washington than the one they have right now.”

Political analyst Matthew Dowd replied:

“The dysfunction”is going to be even more exacerbated”– the political system is broken.”

When George Will objected to this, asserting that the political system was “working beautifully,” Dowd responded quickly: “It’s absolutely broken.”

Jefferson

Many may ask “But why do you say it is broken?” I would respond that I have come to the conclusion that we will never pass a law or any set of laws that can repair what is broken in our system.

In other words, we say we have a Rule of Law system, that we are governed by laws and not by men. But this assumption is false. It is not even what the founding fathers actually believed.

In his writings, Thomas Jefferson said:

“It is the manner and spirit of a people, which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker that soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.”

From this Jefferson concluded that only the citizen farmer was spiritually independent and free of moral corruption sufficient to effectively operate a democratic government.

As a public servant who has been both a prosecutor and a trial judge I can attest to the fact that our laws and our constitution are not the problem. Today our jails are full of those who are poor, addicted to drugs, or who are mentally ill.

But we also fail to acknowledge that it is not only the criminal who suffer from these scourges. Nearly every child dependency case, every divorce and every foreclosure action involves either fear of poverty, drugs, mental illness or some combination of these. And those who sit in the seats of power, those who make the decisions, are not immune from the struggle for wealth, for physical health or even for sanity.

I cite Jefferson because it may be that his thoughts, at one time, were correct, about farm life and the virtues it creates in people. But if this is so we must also face the fact that we are no longer a nation of inherently virtuous farmers. We are now something else. We must ask: What are we a Nation of? What have we become? Will what we have become make better citizens? And if not, is there a way to change it?

Our political system is broken because, for a Democracy to be effective, it cannot be left to a mere handful of professional politicians. Jefferson was right: A real democracy also requires healthy, free and independent citizens.

Public Service As A Way of Life

In his Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961 , President John F. Kennedy hinted at what this new citizen must look like. There he said:

“Now the trumpet summons us again–not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need–not as a call to battle, though embattled we are– but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, “rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation”–a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.

“Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort?

“”.The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it–and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

“And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you- -ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man””

President Kennedy was calling for a different kind of action. He was calling for what I have begun to call “True Service.”

True Service is dedicated work done in the world which includes a consideration of its effect on others. It is not charity. It rests on a redefinition of work itself. In practical terms, this means that any task can be done in one-way or the other. Any job, any work, can be done by using the power of that effort solely for one’s own benefit or by looking out for the benefit that job’s real purpose has for others: whether it is President of the United States or garbage collector. True service is achieved when any job unites power and purpose in benefit to the public.

Every action properly done is an act of public service no matter how high or how lowly the actor. Every action is significant and as such, every single person is critically important. In this way every individual can serve his fellow citizens and repair what is broken. And every single individual becomes a solution, instead of the problem.

Submitters Bio:

Eric Z. Lucas is an alumnus of Stanford University (Creative Writing Major: 1972-1975), the University of Washington (1981: BA English Literature and Elementary Education) and Harvard Law School, J.D. 1986. Since law school he has been a public servant: a prosecuting attorney, a city attorney and a trial judge. Born in Spokane, Washington where his military family lived until the age of twelve, he now resides in Everett, Washington. Married to his wife Beth since 1974, they have four adult children and one grandchild. Eric is the author of a children’s book entitled: “The Island Horse,” available from Amazon.com. His new book” “The Tao of Public Service” will be published by Balboa Press in the fall of 2012.

In 1968 Garret Hardin published his now famous essay, The Tragedy of the Commons, in which he demonstrated that the inevitable result of unconstrained growth on a commonly held pasture was a “tragedy” of consumption.

Hardin used a metaphor of a common pasture open to all to illustrate how each herdsman, acting in his ownrational self-interest, would seek to maximize his personal benefit by putting as many cattle as possible on the pasture, even though it would reduce the quality of the pasture over time.

He employed the term “tragedy” in the sense that philosopher and mathematician Alfred Whitehead used it, “The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.”

The remorseless working of things. In the wake of the complete failure of the Rio+20 Conference those words have sobering weight.

Yet Hardin showed that a growth maximizing economy in a world with finite resources would simply annihilate the natural stocks on which it depended for growth, even while each individual was acting in a rational manner. It gives lie to the perversion of Adman Smith’sInvisible Hand that conservatives use to justify unconstrained capitalism.

The Tragedy of the Commons is a tragedy of this time and this place. Pastures, resources, clean air, a living climate – each is consumed by our current actions, and the consequences take place in the near term.

But it might be useful to think of the more distant future as a commons – to see this tragedy as a “remorseless” consumption of our progenies’ birthright.

Viewed from this perspective, our current lifestyle is revealed as a kind of debt- fueled orgy being conducted at the expense of our children. We are literally robbing them blind.

What would a sustainable economy – a less remorselessly tragic economy that did not treat the future as a commons – look like?

Think of our stock of resources and natural life support systems as a trust fund left by a rich uncle to provide for us in perpetuity. Living off the amount of resources which can be renewed or recycled would be the equivalent of living off the interest from the trust. Dipping into the principal would define an unsustainable economy. When we deplete resources faster than they can be renewed, we are dipping into principal. When we compromise the natural systems that make life possible, we are dipping into principal.

Those extra worlds we consume represents debt – assets taken from our children. In ecologic terms, it is called “overshoot.”

And living systems cannot long survive in overshoot mode.

A classic example of overshoot occurred on St. Mathew Island when the US Coast Guard released 29 Reindeer – 24 females and 5 males—in 1944. By the summer of 1963, the population had exploded to over 6,000 animals. By the end of that year, the population plummeted to fewer than 50 starving animals.

In an ecologic sense, our global economy is very much like the Reindeers at 6,000. We are poised at the top of a dizzying growth jag, but we are seeing the first signs of trouble.

We’re having to scrape the bottom of the barrel for oil, exploiting poor quality resources such as the Canadian tar sands, or ultra-deep offshore oil deposits. We’re having to literally crack the rock beneath our feet to free up natural gas. Our mines are deeper, our ore bodies less concentrated. We are rapidly depleting our non-renewable resources and failing to replace them with renewables.

Just as in that last year, those reindeer were forced to paw desperately for the lichens and moss that once seemed so plentiful, we are staring into a future of scarcity, want, hunger and death.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory recently found that the US could provide as much as 80% of its energy needs by 2050 using renewable energy technologies available today, at modest cost. Improvements in technology could reduce even these low costs.

Ultimately, however, living sustainably is neither an economic issue nor a technological challenge, it is a moral one.

The question we must ask ourselves is: Do we want to continue to rob from children not yet born so that we can add a few inches to our already obscenely large TVs; a few horsepower to our crudely over-powered cars; or another 1000 square feet to our self-indulgent McMansions?

And if the answer to those questions is no, then we must vote with our pocket books and wallets as well as in our voting booths.

Quite simply, we can no longer purchase from companies who treat the future as a dump . We can no longer vote for candidates who say they are concerned about the deficit while they run up irrevocable deficits on the only wealth that really matters – natural capital. And most especially we can no longer vote for candidates and incumbents who say they are concerned about our future every four years, and then run the country by the same crooked rules that treat the future as a commons, charting our way remorselessly toward the mother of all tragedies in the intervening years.

John Atcheson is author of the novel, A Being Darkly Wise, an eco-thriller and Book One of a Trilogy centered on global warming. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News and other major newspapers. Atcheson’s book reviews are featured on Climateprogess.org.